There is a long and honourable tradition of gore with giggles - the problem is the ante needs to be upped substantially each time to tug at nerves slackened by the tedium of ultra-violence. Anyone writing with the dual aim of fist-in-mouth shockery and humour needs to work bloody hard, and MacBride does, showing us just how much fun body parts can be. Flesh House kicks off with wholesale cannibalism in the form of a shipping container full of frozen man chops. As more and more human meat ends up in the food chain, the action moves to an abattoir and ends (where else?) in a cellar. The Aberdeen police, hampered by a TV crew who are trying to make a documentary, conduct the largest manhunt in the city's history to find a notorious serial butcher who has been released from prison, his conviction overturned on appeal. Go on, laugh yourself sick.

Bleeding Heart Square, by Andrew Taylor (Michael Joseph, £16.99)

Only one sort of body part here: the decomposing hearts that arrive in the post for Joseph Serridge, landlord of the dingy lodging house in the eponymous square. Partly based on a celebrated Victorian murder case, the action has been updated to 1934, with a backdrop of mass unemployment, political confusion and fascist menace. When aristocratic Lydia Langstone, fleeing an abusive husband, takes refuge with her genteelly down-at-heel father, she discovers that former landlady Miss Penhow disappeared four years earlier in mysterious circumstances, and that a seedy plain-clothes policeman is watching the house. In a depiction of lonely, unfulfilled lives worthy of Patrick Hamilton, Taylor fuels his story with quiet desperation - for love, work, money or simply booze - to create a moving, atmospheric and suspenseful tale of true pathos.

Obedience, by Will Lavender (Macmillan, £12.99)

American writer Lavender's first book begins with a fascinating premise that invokes social psychologist Stanley Milgram's controversial experiment on obedience, showing that people were willing to administer what they believed were severe electric shocks to others when told to by an authority figure. Professor Williams of Winchester University gives his logic and reasoning class the task of finding a missing girl, telling them that if they fail, she will be murdered. At first, the students treat it as an intellectual exercise, but when they discover disturbing similarities between their apparently fictional case and the disappearance, 20 years ago, of young Deanna Ward, they start to wonder. At this point, the novel begins to slip its moorings, as the plot starts to sink under the weight of the twists, elaborations and, ultimately, absurdities that are heaped upon it.

The Death Maze, by Ariana Franklin (Bantam Press, £12.99)

Set in 12th-century England, the sequel to the award-winning Mistress of the Art of Death more than lives up to the promise of its predecessor. Salerno-trained physician Adelia Aguilar reluctantly agrees to investigate the fatal poisoning of King Henry II's favourite mistress, Rosemund Clifford. Queen Eleanor, who is fomenting rebellion against her estranged husband, is accused of her murder. Aguilar's work takes her on a bone-shaking winter journey from the Fens to an Oxfordshire abbey, where all parties, including the queen's, are soon trapped by the weather. Paranoia and suspicion ensue as political alliances shift and re-form. Seamlessly weaving real and fictitious characters with vivid descriptions of medieval life from limb-amputation to ice-skating, The Death Maze is a rich banquet of a book.